Nationwide murder rates are on course to plummet for the third year in a row, with one prominent analyst saying 2025 could see the lowest number of per-capita killings on record.
“Since President Trump took office, murder rates have plummeted across the entire United States,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday.
“American families were promised their communities would be safer and President Trump swiftly delivered by vocally being tough on crime, unequivocally backing law enforcement, and standing firm on violent criminals being held to the fullest extent of the law.”
According to the FBI, 2014 saw the lowest murder rate dating back to 1960 — with 4.46 killings per 100,000 Americans.
In 2023, the most recent year for which FBI statistics are available, the murder rate dropped to 5.75 per 100,000 from a recent high of 6.83 per 100,000 in 2020, a year that saw the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as widespread racial unrest.
In 2024, according to the Real-Time Crime Index — a database maintained by AH Datalytics which compiles reports from more than 400 local agencies — the homicide rate dipped again, to 4.97 per 100,000, below the official FBI rate in both 2018 (5.15) and 2019 (5.17).
In the first three months of this year, the index shows, the number of murders has dropped by a further 21.6% from the same period in 2024.
“[I]t’s fairly clear that a decline in the direction we’re currently seeing would safely give 2025 the title of lowest US murder rate ever recorded,” independent analyst Jeff Asher wrote in a May 12 Substack post. --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File |
The fact that the COVID-19 vaccine is not available for newborn babies is shielding a group of prisoners on Georgia's death row from execution.
Executions in Georgia were halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the state attorney general's office entered into an agreement with lawyers for people on death row to set the terms under which they could resume for a specific group of prisoners. At least one of those conditions, having to do with the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine, has not been met, and seeking an execution date for a prisoner covered by the agreement would breach the agreement, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Shukura Ingram ruled.
The agreement includes three conditions that had to be met before executions could be set for the affected prisoners: the expiration of the state’s COVID-19 judicial emergency, the resumption of normal visitation at state prisons and the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine “to all members of the public.” Once those conditions were met, the state agreed to give three months' notice before pursuing an execution warrant for one of the prisoners covered by the agreement and six months' notice for the rest.
The state has argued that the agreement should no longer apply, contending the conditions have been met. But defense attorneys say it's still valid because the vaccine isn't yet available to infants under 6 months old, and visitation at state prisons has not returned to normal.
Ingram's ruling, issued Friday, addressed only the vaccination question. She plans to handle the visitation issue separately.
Ingram wrote that the state's arguments “all boil down to an attempt to rewrite the Agreement.” The state is “(u)nhappy with the language it drafted” and wants to change it so that the condition would be satisfied once vaccines are available to “most members of the public.”
“But courts cannot rewrite contracts to relieve a party of their regrets,” she wrote. She ruled that the agreement is “binding and enforceable,” that the vaccination condition hasn't been met and that seeking an execution warrant before the requirements have been met would breach the agreement.
The state attorney general's office plans to appeal, a spokesperson said Tuesday. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
At-home heart attacks and cardiac deaths on the rise since COVID-19 pandemic
Alarming nail changes that signal COVID infection
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment